Here is an excerpt from Jay Smith’s preface to the new revised and expanded version of Did Muhammad Exist?. Order it here.
Eight years ago when Robert Spencer published his second major book on Muhammad, entitled Did Muhammad Exist? It was one of the first books to publicly question the very existence of the man almost two billion Muslims look to as their paradigm for life today.
So, why have so few dared to go where Spencer went eight years ago? The answer is simple. To do so would have labelled them as “hate-preachers” or “Islamophobes” and closed the doors to any future books or positions within academic institutions.
No other religion attaches the word “phobic” to those who dare question it like Islam does, suggesting it uniquely needs protection from criticism, unlike Christianity, which has been attacked and vilified for centuries now, yet needs no protection from such attacks.
Yet, the “argument from silence” has continued to haunt us. It begins with the notion that just because there is an “absence of evidence,” that doesn’t necessarily assume that there is “evidence of absence,” a clever ditty which suggests that if given enough time something somewhere will come to light which will prove this man did live and die in the central part of Arabia, or that he received the Qur’an in twenty-two years and began one of the largest and fastest-growing religions found in the world today.
Spencer’s 2012 riposte to this argument was to find and tabulate evidence from the very century Muhammad should have lived, in the form of coins, rock inscriptions, buildings, mosques, and written letters to prove that the later ninth- and tenth-century traditional Muhammad was the wrong man at the wrong place doing the wrong things at the wrong time. But still not too many people paid attention.
And then 2020 rolled around, a year which will probably be best remembered as the year of the debilitating pandemic and the US elections. But for those of us who are interested in the history of Islam, 2020 will be better remembered as the year when the Qur’an took a real “beating” due to a single twenty-five-minute interview between a Muslim scholar (Dr. Yasir Qadhi) and a notorious Muslim blogger (Mohammed Hijab). It was in that interview that the now infamous line “The standard narrative has holes in it” was introduced, referring to the thirty official and different Arabic ‘Qira’at’ Qur’ans, admitting on the most public of platforms (YouTube) that not every Qur’an is the same, with tens of thousands of different words and letters between them.
Simultaneously, other new “holes in the narrative” were being uncovered by numerous scholars around the world concerning the historical authenticity of Muhammad as well. These included approximately 30,000 rock inscriptions suggesting pretty clearly that prior to 690 AD, there are no references to Muhammad, nor his religion, nor to his city Mecca, nor to his book, the Qur’an. New coins were being uncovered suggesting that the Arabs living in the seventh century were either Christians in the West, or Zoroastrians in the East, proving yet again an absence of any evidence for early Islam.
The supposed letters of Muhammad, as well as the references to him by late-seventh century Christian clerics were all found to be either ninth or sixteenth-century frauds, or references to someone similar to him, yet carrying out the wrong acts at the wrong places when compared to the Muhammad we read about in the later traditions.
In fact, so much new evidence confronting Muhammad’s existence in the seventh century has been uncovered since 2012 that Spencer was asked by his publishers to rewrite his book on Muhammad—which he did immediately—adding over 25 percent newer and more convincing arguments to those he had introduced eight years earlier.
This book then, is the result of those new and improved arguments, forcing those who still believe in the Muhammad of the later ninth and tenth centuries to provide even one piece of evidence for that later Muhammad in the seventh century, which to date, they simply cannot.
Ironically, the onus is no longer on us. It is now on them to convince us that indeed their Muhammad is historical; otherwise, it is they, and not us, who now “argue from silence.”
Jim says
If he did exist, it is too bad, as he was not such a nice person, to say the least. Perhaps they avoid talking about what it says about him in the Koran. And so their ideas of Mohammed are not based on what it actually says about him in the holy books. Or are the Muslims so mean they actually like what it says about their ideal man?
gravenimage says
Actually, pious Muslims refer to the savagery of their “Prophet” Muhammed all the time, and use him as the ideal model of behavior.
mortimer says
Very good article. The ONUS IS NOW ON THE MUSLIM APOLOGISTS to show us a 7th century Mohammed. They cannot do so because any scraps of the ‘original’ biography of Mohammed have either been DESTROYED by the caliphs or LOST or such a biography NEVER EXISTED because there was no such 7th century figure.
There were various legendary stories about Robin Hood or King Arthur or Beowulf which were later turned into entertainment. The stories about Mohammed appear to be very similar to those entertaining stories and legends.
Until additional references to Mohammed appear from the 7th century, the legends of Mohammed will remain no more than that. Those legends are internally contradictory, lacking in certain historic details and lacking independent confirmation.
SKA says
This is what I call the “charismatic fallacy:” for true Muslims the standards of morality are not found in deontological ethics or in the revealed Ten Commandments. Rather whatever the “ideal man” approved of, or practiced himself, or claimed to reveal, become the standards of morality. Under this understanding of morality it is no objection to find narratives in which Mohamet approves of lying, raping captive women, looting and destroying or to find reports that he did these things himself. These things would not be held to discredit his character. On the contrary they “prove” that lying, rape, murder and looting can all be viewed as laudable and even holy actions if done for the greater glory of Mohammadanism. As Anjuli Padavar pointed out in her essay on the psychological traum of the modern Muslim, the educated followers of Mohamet today know of ethics based on categorical imperatives based on reason and the experience of mankind and they know of the ideal if personal conscience that allows one to critique even the canons of Islam. The “ideal man” can be seen to have been utterly UN-ideal and unworthy of emulation.
gravenimage says
Good post, SKA.
gravenimage says
‘One of the first books to publicly question the existence of the man Muslims look to as their paradigm for life’
……………….
Good stuff from Jay Smith.